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Doubtful. The articles are very clickbait heavy, “PS5” “Xbox Scarlett” “Fortnite”
UE4 was rebuilt from the ground up and designed to be much more flexible than UE3. There’s no reason they couldn’t add a ray tracing as another option along with forward and deferred rendering. No reason UE4 couldn’t last 8 years or longer like UE3.
I’m a bit doubtful that Epic had a lot of extra development time and resources this year, after dealing with the success and updates of Fornite, the Raytracing tech demos, rolling out Unreal Engine Studio, and all their other projects. It’s been a busy year with no lack of projects.
Unless there’s a big feature that they can’t do with the current engine, then they won’t be doing a new big engine version and will just continue updating UE4.
UE4 is marketed just as Unreal Engine so it’s intended to continue for a very long time.
Numbered releases have just become sort of a marketing gimmick now… I don’t think Unreal Engine has any need to do that, especially compared to say PS4 and Grand Theft Auto where they would actually benefit substantially from sales by releasing PS5 etc. Also it would destroy the marketplace if done in the wrong way.
Destroy the marketplace why? How? It is not that Unity Asset Store stops working and sellers stop selling at each new major release of that engine. Although Unreal Engine 4.x breaks compatibility quicker between versions it would be really unprofessional if Epic Games decided to change everything with no easy upgrade path so forcing marketplace developers to remake everything from scratch for each and every product.
Yes. and that would be a case of “doing it the wrong way”, so you answered your own question. The 4.x. changes are no big deal really, I update old asset packs all the time by myself. But if there was a big change, I’d like Epic to assist marketplace sellers with it as much as possible…